Giddy from the one-two punch of an all-American Disney Halloween double feature, I’ve crossed the Atlantic to see how those Brit brats did Halloween in the distant past of the 1970s (ouch)
Well, not Halloween specifically, but there are monsters, kids, horror movies,
tricks, costumes and nighttime shenanigans; so let’s have a look at Play For
Today’s ‘Vampires’ as recommended by that Scarred For Life Basefook page…
Hmm. Visceral. There’s a bit more going on in this than I’d thought, with latchkey youngsters, dead teachers and men taking clandestine meetings in municipal cemeteries during daylight hours, but what an interesting wee piece!
The precis: A huddle of overimaginative boys (with one seriously impressionable member) after a night in getting Hammered (The Scars of Dracula, to be exact) take the notion that a tall, cloaked man they’ve seem in the local boneyard is a vampire. One of the boys, the impressionable one, buys some joke shop fangs and turns his anorak into a Dracula-wrap, and things kind of escalate from there. But not how you might think. Perhaps befitting Play for Today, it’s a bit more domestic and social commentary than fantastic in its scope – and yet, if indeed I did set out to try to find the mindset of scar-crossed tykes in the era of Whoopee and Monster Fun comics, I think I found it, alongside a cautionary depiction of life in inner Liverpool in the dying days of the Seventies, comprehensive schooling, dour Christianity and broken homes.
Halloweenometer: As mentioned, not really Halloweeny, but then Halloween wasn’t really a thing in the UK in the Seventies, even when Hammer Films were still a TV convention and your local joke shop had a reliably creepy staffer more than ready to impress you with his theories on the supernatural. Still, mostly harmless fun, and not without its charms. Pretty good! :[
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